The Forces in Conflict 145
Aggressive anti- Christianity did not develop in America, to the great good for-
tune of the future United States. It failed to develop, however, not because Ameri-
can revolutionary leaders were warmly religious, but because no religious body se-
riously stood in their way. Here again it was the weakness of conservative forces,
not their strength, that made the Revolution “conservative.” No church seriously
opposed the political aims of the Revolution. No church figured as a first estate in
colonial America, none had its dignitaries sitting in the highest councils of gov-
ernment, and none lost vast tracts of material property, since none possessed any.^9
The Anglican clergy generally opposed the Revolution, because of their close con-
nection with British authority. Revolutionaries drove them out of their churches,
for the same reason; worse would have happened to them had they not been so
easily dislodged. In any case, even where the Anglican church was established, in
New York and the South, Anglicans were not a majority of the population. At the
opposite end of the religious spectrum the Quakers, because of their doctrine of
non- resistance to established authority, were in effect a force to be reckoned on the
British side. But they were unimportant politically outside of Pennsylvania. Over
half the colonial Americans, and probably ninety per cent of New Englanders,
were, vaguely or exactly, some species of Calvinists. No allegation was more com-
mon, from the British or the American loyalists, than that the whole Revolution
had been stirred up by old Presbyterian disaffection. It is true that New England
Congregationalists and Scotch- Irish Presbyterians did not admire some of the
contemporary institutions of England, and that their ministers, when the time
came, generally supported the Revolution. They probably infused, in a way hard to
define, a certain religious atmosphere into the American patriot program.
A great many Americans, however, before and during the Revolution, belonged
to no church at all. In conditions of constant movement, uprooting, settlement,
and resettlement, probably a larger proportion of Americans were unchurched
than in any European country. What aroused horror, when violently pursued as
dechristianization in France a few years later, had gone pretty far, without vio-
lence, in America. As for the leaders of the American Revolution, it should be
unnecessary to demonstrate that most of them were deists. They were strongly on
the side of the best human virtues, or at least of those which were not ascetic; but
they saw no connection between such virtues and religious practice. Like Jefferson
in the Declaration of Independence, they appealed to the laws of Nature’s God.
They seem not to have felt, however, like Burke, that these laws placed serious
limits upon their freedom of political action.
The simplicities in which British America had originated gave way to more
complex forms of society in the eighteenth century. A liberty almost like that of
9 The nearest thing in America to the recognition of higher clergy as lords spiritual, or as a first
estate, was the fact that the commissary of the Bishop of London, at such times as such a functionary
was in America, had a seat in certain governors’ councils. Confiscation of church property went far-
thest in Virginia, where, not during the heat of revolution, but as late as 1799 and 1802, all real and
movable property possessed by the Episcopal church before 1776, including church buildings them-
selves, was confiscated by the state. The state of Virginia persisted in this policy despite the fact that
the United States Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1815. See G. M. Brydon, “The Anti-
Ecclesiatical Laws in Virginia,” in Virginia Magazine of History, LXIV (1956), 259–60.